Armageddon

NASA has a special treat for us this Halloween: Narrowly escaping the destruction of the planet!

Well, sort of. Through the use of their new computer program called Scout, NASA has determined that a potentially-dangerous asteroid will be breezing past Earth by a mere 310,000 miles. Rejoice! We’re going to be ok!

Scout is part of a new detection system that alerts us when a giant piece of space rock is on its way, hurdling towards Earth at thousands of miles per hour. Think of it like Domino's Pizza Tracker, but for things that could potentially destroy our entire planet and not just your body.

The new program seems to be working great. According to NPR,astronomer Paul Chodas said, “The NASA surveys are finding something like at least five Asteroids a night.”

“Objects can come close to the Earth shortly after discovery,” he continued. “The main goal of Scout is to speed up the confirmation process... Our goal right now is to find 90 percent of the 140-meter asteroids and larger.”

Now, what would we do if an asteroid were to hit Earth? Well, scientists are still working on that. In the meantime, here’s a clip from the Ben Affleck’s commentary track for the Criterion Collection DVD of Armageddon, in which mercilessly makes fun of the movie and its director, Michael Bay. More reason to not put “landing a spaceship on an asteroid, drilling a hole in it, and blowing it up” on the list of “Possible Solutions for Asteroid Hitting Earth.”

As we wrote about last week, there were a few megachurch preachers who were really, really, really, banking on last nights super blood moon to mark the start of Revelations and bring on the apocalypse already. Well, we're sad to say it didn't.

What we can say is that it provided one super beautiful spectacle in the sky. Numerous people took advantage and shot some lovely time lapse videos that we can watch, wistfully remembering a more hopeful time when we were planning for the rapture.

If you slept through the eclipse, and the cancelled Armageddon, you may be wondering just what in the hell a super blood moon is. A super moon is when a full moon is at its closest orbit to Earth and the blood moon part indicates the fourth lunar eclipse this year. The two coincided and we were hoping the world would be bathed in the cleaning flames of infinite justice. But nope.

The next super blood moon will occur in 2033. So, stalk up on water and canned goods. Plenty of time to build that fall out shelter.

It's tough to take your eyes off the swirling orange bands, but it's the blue band coming from the west that is freaking everyone out. That's just a plain old storm front that went rogue, picking up a blast of arctic air as it sped across the country. When mixed with the warm tropical storm, it means Armageddon is coming early for the eastern seaboard -- the rest of the world will just have to wait for December.